"stone" wrote in message
om...
I have a secondhand, homemade aircompressor that uses a small tank
with a platform welded to the tank for the motor and compressor.

Is it safe to weld to an air tank?

At first I thought this was crazy to do, but then I thought of
the very high pressure welded pipes on gas wells, and so forth.


So, is it safe if welded properly? And second, if it does have a bad weld
on it, will it just pop out the weld and then fiz off, or is it
and explosion hazzard?

It's a homemade small air compressor set at about a 100 psi.



Let's assume that the tank is a small one. For talking purposes, let's take
a sphere about 18" in diameter. That's got 339 square inches of interior
surface in each of the two hemispheres. If your weld should fail and the
two halves separate, each half flies off with over 28 thousand pounds of
force behind it -- that's 85 psi x 339 square inches (because standard
atmospheric pressure is ~15 psi). It would probably put a serious dent in
any surface it hits even if it doesn't penetrate it. Any surface. even a
human body. If it were me, I'd leave it to the professionals who have the
equipment to test their welds at pressures much higher than you'd ever
subject them to.

Norm